I guess it might be better to repackage this as something that isn't a rant.
RT is a company that is currently owned by Warner Bros. (through a chain of ownership). This alone is enough for someone to raise the possibility they may not be completely unbiased in how they treat each movie despite having any evidence of such behavior. Conflict of interest, in my own experience, have never required evidence of any further problem outside of the conflict of interest itself. Since the end result is merely movie ratings which is a fully subjective experienced, it isn't worth time digging any further into.
When it comes to a news rating site that will likely be deciding things of a more factual nature (news is true or not, or at least somewhat based on true events), I think a potential conflict of interest has larger implications. Whom ever owns the site will have a conflict of interest with regards to at least some news, and the ability of that site to be used by other groups like non-profits, NGOs, or even governments will need to be limited with respect to where the conflict of interest will occur.
I don't think the difference is in the difficulty of making a RT for news, but on the downstream impacts of the conflict of interest that exists between owner and purpose.
While that's true for the possibility of conflict of interests, do you have any proof/data showing they've actually flexed that conflict for their own gain? Undermining the trust in the authority of the aggregate values is a huge issue I'm sure they'd much rather avoid as much as possible in order to extract as much value out of the platform as possible.
I know a bunch of folks recently complained that they were trying to manipulate the scores for Captain Marvel, but that was also under a huge organized attack to torpedo the audience scores even before it was released for viewing. So they had a legitimate reason to go in and try to "fix" the scores. Whether the new values is "accurate" is of course up to debate (for philosophical values of "accurate") but most of the criticisms I've seen have had reasonable explanations behind them.
When avoiding a conflict of interest matters, normally there isn't a standard of requiring evidence of any impropriety for behavior to be deemed inappropriate. Merely not avoiding the conflict of interest is enough. Granted, for something like civil lawsuit or criminal charges this alone isn't enough and evidence is required, but for matters such as violating professional ethics not disclosing a conflict of interest is enough.
Like I said, with movies reviews it does not matter (at least in my opinion). The issue I have is that I don't think such a carefree attitude can be taken when it comes to rating the truthfulness or applicability of news.
As for any examples of actions, I do not have access to the sort of data to determine if any such actions were taken, nor do I have the resources nor desire necessary to even begin investigating. Also, especially in relation to recent events that touch on a more political scale, I rather not deal with the issue of evidence being trusted based on the extent it confirms existing views (a cognitive bias common to humanity that isn't particularly worse in this case, but which I have seen result in flame wars on other forums).
The conflict of ownership also doesn’t work since Captain Marvel’s studio, Disney-Fox, are the biggest competitors to Rotten Tomatoes’s AT&T/Warner and Comcast/NBC Universal owners.
Pretty unimportant but just clearing up ownership info. Warner Bros/AT&T are minority owners of Fandango which owns Rotten Tomatoes. Comcast/NBC Universal are majority owners.
Hah I wasn’t blasting you or anything! Sorry if I made it that way. I tried saying it was unimportant to the overall convo. If anything it reinforces your argument since it’s two of the big 5 movie studios.
RT is a company that is currently owned by Warner Bros. (through a chain of ownership). This alone is enough for someone to raise the possibility they may not be completely unbiased in how they treat each movie despite having any evidence of such behavior. Conflict of interest, in my own experience, have never required evidence of any further problem outside of the conflict of interest itself. Since the end result is merely movie ratings which is a fully subjective experienced, it isn't worth time digging any further into.
When it comes to a news rating site that will likely be deciding things of a more factual nature (news is true or not, or at least somewhat based on true events), I think a potential conflict of interest has larger implications. Whom ever owns the site will have a conflict of interest with regards to at least some news, and the ability of that site to be used by other groups like non-profits, NGOs, or even governments will need to be limited with respect to where the conflict of interest will occur.
I don't think the difference is in the difficulty of making a RT for news, but on the downstream impacts of the conflict of interest that exists between owner and purpose.